Page 12 of Monsters in the Museum

The spear rested heavily across her lap, a grounding weight as she panted in fear and relief. When she raised her eyes, Adam still fought the shadows, but only a few remained and the smoke had stopped coming in from under the door. As he dealt with the remaining creatures, Nora’s eyes slid closed, and she leaned her head back against her table, the throbbing from where her skull had collided with the edge, forcing itself back to the forefront of her consciousness.

After what felt like a few moments later, but might have been several minutes, there was a clatter and a warm presence at her side. Nora peeled her eyes open to see that Adam had dropped the sword and kneeled on the floor beside her. His hands flew to her face and smoothed over her forehead and hair, trying to meet her unfocused eyes with his. The warmth of his hands felt nice in her hair, despite how sweaty she was.

“Nora? Nora,” he repeated, his tone bordering on pleading.

Her eyes slid over him, distantly noting that he had a few small holes charred in his tweed blazer, and the long end of his tie had been singed right off where the creature had grabbed it. He looked otherwise unscathed.

“Nora, are you alright?” His face was frantic, not at all like the grim determination he had worn when he was grappling with the shadow creatures.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said as she reached up and grabbed his hand, which still smoothed over her sweat-soaked hair. She put her other hand on the ground to push herself up to stand but didn’t make it six inches off the ground before she slid back down, finding herself quite dizzy and weak. “I think I hit my head a little too hard.”

“That’s not all.” Adam’s face turned ashen as he looked down at the ground. Nora followed his gaze to find that his knees were soaked in a spreading puddle of blood. With growing nausea, she traced it to its source—flowing from a gash in her upper thigh, right where the creature had grabbed her before she killed it.

I killed it, she thought, her mind unable or unwilling to focus on the blood streaming out of her. She had never killed anything before.

“By St. Boogar and all the saints at the backside door of purgatory!”

Adam swore so colorfully that Nora was drawn back to reality enough to gape at him even in her current delirious state.

“One advantage of being an English professor—you’re exposed to a lot of wonderfully creative expletives,” Adam commented in a voice so falsely calm that his intent to distract Nora from her injuries was immediately transparent. As he spoke, Adam pulled off the remnants of his tie. As soon as he had jerked the strip of plaid fabric from around his neck, he began fastening it around her upper thigh above the gash. After knotting it securely, he reached up into a drawer of her table and rifled around for a moment before retrieving a pen. He forced the pen into the loop he had made around her leg and twisted it until the binding pulled tight around her leg, causing Nora to grunt and jerk away in pain. He paid her distress no heed and used the free end of the fabric to fasten the pen in place, leaving the loop taut around her thigh. Her breath came in short pants from the pain and the sharp pinch of the tie, but the sensations grew fuzzy and distant in her mind.

A tourniquet, she mused as she grappled with her receding consciousness. Her eyes began drifting closed, but she forced them open again as Adam murmured, “We have to get you to a hospital.”

She forced herself to form words even though her tongue felt as if it had turned into a large rubber ball in her mouth.

“Dr. Drew Coleman. The emergency room at Northwestern Memorial.” Her voice sounded far away, as if she was shouting from underwater. “Ask for Drew.”

The world spun dizzily around her, and for a moment, she thought she had finally passed out until she jerked once again and realized that Adam had scooped her off the ground and began to run. She tried to move her head, but whether it was to protest or to bury her face in Adam’s chest, she couldn’t say. The last thought she had as she lost her grasp on reality was one of disbelief as she registered that he was reciting a Russian nursery rhyme as he ran with her cradled in his arms.